Return of the Native

Compared with the chaotic halls outside,
Johnson Brown's Navajo language classroom is an island of serenity at
Chinle High School.

The windowless room seems almost womblike, soothed by the soft
sounds of a Navajo flute recording in the background. The language
spoken here is one that many of the students have heard in their homes
all their lives. And Brown, who himself spoke only the native language
until he entered school in the 3rd grade, presides over the classroom
with a dignified, gentle calm.

There's a lot to learn in this classroom, given the complexity of the language. The walls are covered with posters of shapes, numbers, and animals labeled in Navajo, while
Navajo sentences fill up the blackboard. The room's four computers have
also been programmed so that students can type in the Navajo alphabet,
with its elaborate series of accent marks.

But what sets this class and its mission apart is the sense that it
is a sanctuary of sorts for a native language and culture that is
precious to its people. And at the head of the class is Brown, one of
the home-grown teachers the reservation is cultivating--and counting
on--to preserve Navajo traditions that might otherwise be
forgotten.

For many years, children on the reservation were sent to
government-run or church-run boarding schools, where they were
forbidden even to speak in Navajo. As recently as a generation ago,
Navajo teachers were a rarity, and Navajo language classes were unheard
of on the reservation.

All that has changed in recent years with efforts by the Navajo
Nation and outside groups to increase the number of Navajo teachers to
help preserve the language and culture of their heritage.

The Navajo crusade happens to parallel a larger national movement to
recruit minority teachers whom, experts believe, have a better chance
of reaching children of the same race or ethnicity.

That's why the Navajo Nation's endeavor caught the attention of the
New York City-based Ford Foundation in 1991. The foundation, which had
embarked on a $25 million minority teacher education initiative, helped
the tribe launch the Navajo Nation Ford Teacher Education Program.
Working with six local southwestern colleges and universities, the
collaboration has enabled Navajo teachers' aides to study their native
language and earn a bachelor's degree in teacher education.

As the program's graduates, such as Brown, enter teaching positions
on the reservation, the Ford seed money is ending. But the Navajo
Nation, determined to prepare its own teachers, has vowed to continue
this effort. At stake for the tribe, after all, is nothing less than a
way of life.

Children growing up on Indian reservations are part of a Native
American population that has suffered disproportionately from poverty
and unemployment, as well as a host of other social ills including
alcoholism and drug abuse.

According to the American Indian College Fund, most reservations
face unemployment rates of 60 percent or more. The Denver-based
nonprofit fund-raising organization also notes that only a small number
of Indian nations run gaming operations. And even most of those
generate revenues that are insufficient to finance needs in health
clinics, water systems, job training, elderly care, and education.

Exacerbating the already grim conditions on many reservations is the
high dropout rate among Native American students. A nationally
representative longitudinal study conducted by the National Center for
Education Statistics found that out of a cohort of students who were
first surveyed in 1988 in the 8th grade, 16.9 percent of the American
Indians had dropped out as of 1994. Their dropout rate was higher than
that of all other minority groups, according to the survey.

Nationwide, several groups have taken action to address the scarcity
of Native Americans teaching on the reservations. For example, last
October, the Philip Morris Companies Inc. granted $200,000 for
teacher-training and -development programs at nine tribal colleges.
Those teacher training grants, coordinated through the college fund,
aimed to increase the number of special education and native-language
courses offered at the colleges. The grants were also intended to
improve the often negative attitudes on reservations toward the
teaching profession that are a holdover from the church and government
boarding schools that were seen as the destroyers of Navajo
culture.

On the Navajo reservation, the social and education statistics for
the 172,400 people there are not much brighter than on other
reservations. The unemployment rate fluctuates between 38 percent and
50 percent, according to Diné College, formerly known as Navajo
Community College, and more than 56 percent of the Navajos live in
poverty, with a per capita income of $4,106. Although many work in
retail trades, construction, and professional services, the education
system is the biggest source of jobs.

Yet, in 1990, according to the Navajo Nation, 36.4 percent of its
people 25 and older had completed less than a 9th grade education. And
while 17 percent of the people in that age group had completed some
college, only 2.9 percent had earned a bachelor's degree or higher.

The paucity of formally educated role models extends to the
classroom. As of 1990, according to Navajo Nation officials, only 20
percent of the 6,000 certified teachers on the reservation were
natives. Many of the non-Navajo teachers come for a short time and then
leave the reservation altogether. In contrast, the reservation's
roughly 1,000 teachers' aides are almost all Navajo.

In 1991, Peterson Zah, then-president of the Navajo Nation, launched a
challenge to graduate 1,000 certified Navajo teachers by the end of
1997. The Ford Foundation's minority teacher training initiative became
one strategy in reaching this goal.

Six colleges and universities teamed up with the Navajo Nation to
work on the program: in Arizona, Diné College in Tsaile,
Prescott College in Prescott, and Northern Arizona University in
Flagstaff; in Colorado, Fort Lewis College in Durango and the
University of Northern Colorado in Greeley; and in New Mexico, the
University of New Mexico at Gallup.

Under the program, aspiring teachers who have some college-credit
hours and speak Navajo study part-time at the participating colleges.
The participants receive tuition assistance as well as a $250 stipend
per term to cover transportation, child care, books, and miscellaneous
expenses.

In addition to their teacher education classes, the students are
required to take 17 hours of Navajo language courses offered by
Diné College, which is known for curricula based on traditional
knowledge and cultural ideals.

The Navajo language requirement is the most distinctive, as well as
the most useful, part of the program, say many of its participants.
They believe that they communicate better with the students when they
speak to them in a familiar language.

Doris Davis, a Navajo-Ford program graduate who teaches 7th and 8th
grade English at Chinle Junior High School, says she informally
surveyed her students and found that they understood her classes better
when she explained ideas in both Navajo and English.

"A lot of times, the Navajo children get lost," she says. "I see it
in their faces, and I switch over [to Navajo] and say, 'This is what
I'm trying to say to you.'"

Her testimony is no surprise in light of statistics provided by the
Navajo Nation: 82 percent of Indians age 5 and older on the reservation
speak the native language at home. The Navajo language can be heard
almost everywhere on the reservation--from casual conversations to
broadcasts from the local country-music station.

Yet, Johnson Brown, whose class focuses on learning to read and
write in Navajo, sees a cultural imperative to preserve what might not
otherwise be formally taught. "When I went to school, there was no
Navajo class, and all of my teachers were non-Indians," says Brown, who
was a security guard at Chinle High School before he became a
teacher.

"Our language is fading," he says. Some of his students speak the
language fluently, he notes, but don't know how to read and write in
Navajo. "I want to be there to try to give some information to the
kids."

Brown and Davis' home base of Chinle, one of the larger towns on the
reservation, rests at the mouth of the expansive and verdant Canyon de
Chelly, the site of farmland that has anchored families there for
generations.

It lies nearly in the center of the massive Navajo reservation,
which encompasses 25,351 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico, and
Utah.

Throughout the reservation, the scenery--sculptured sandstone
formations and canyons, low hills, mountains, and prairies--is
breathtaking but desolate. Small outposts are scattered few and far
between, and drives of several hours are not uncommon to travel from
one town to another.

The remote homesites of many families, combined with the strong ties
of the people to the land, make travel and relocation for higher
education difficult for many students.

The ties may be even tighter for program participants who tend to be
older and have family responsibilities. According to a recent report,
88 percent are female, 82 percent have children, and their average age
is 39.

But the Navajo-Ford collaborative has strived to make the logistics
easier for them. Classes are offered in many cases on satellite
campuses near students' homes, schedules are flexible and individually
designed, and most courses are scheduled in the evenings or on
weekends.

One program graduate, Tom Chee, says he could not imagine being an
"urban person" and going away to school. He earned his degree from Fort
Lewis College, through courses offered at the Diné College
branch campus in Shiprock, N.M., in the northeast corner of the
reservation. At 8,900 people, it is the most populous town on the
reservation.

"I raise horses and cattle and things like that, and I can't
conceive of leaving them," says Chee, a teacher at Shiprock Northwest
High School, an alternative school in Shiprock. "If I went that route,
I probably would have dropped my plan to be a teacher."

The on-site classes make a big difference for many Navajo students,
says Gary Knight, an education professor at Fort Lewis College and the
coordinator of the Navajo-Ford program at that institution. On-campus
graduation rates for Navajo students sink as low as 10 percent, he
says, while the graduation rate of Navajo students in his college's
reservation-based programs are about 85 percent. Of course, locale may
not account for the entire difference. The students taking courses on
the reservation are generally older and have already made up their
minds to pursue a teaching profession, he says.

Another partner, Prescott College, takes great pains to make up for
the distance and travel hurdles students face in continuing their
education, says Carol Perry, the academic adviser at Prescott's campus
in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation. The school allows
students to arrange many of their classes one-on-one with local
instructors, often teachers with master's degrees working in local
elementary and secondary schools.

Even for reservation-based classes, however, most students have to
log lengthy travel time in a car. Although the Navajo Nation runs a bus
along the roughly 25 miles between Window Rock to the University of New
Mexico at Gallup, that service doesn't fully meet all of students'
transportation needs.

"It's not like there's a mass-transit system," says Pat H. Stall,
the coordinator of the education program at the University of New
Mexico at Gallup. "The time on the road, you just do it out here, but
it does provide for some difficulties."

Other barriers, perhaps, may be greater to surmount than the
logistical ones. Many prospective teachers must deal with a lack of
support from families, particularly from those members who are
skeptical of the role classroom teachers have played in the lives of
many Native Americans.

Prescott College's Perry estimates that only about one-third of her
students have the backing of their families, stemming in large part
from a perception shaped by the boarding schools of the past. "Part of
it is, traditionally, education was the 'weapon of choice' to destroy
the culture and the language," says Perry.

"The parents of my students went through that kind of a system; my
students, as well, went through part of that," Perry adds. "There isn't
a lot of belief that education can do good things because it's brought
a lot of social disruption in the past to families."

These days, about 80 percent of the reservation's more than 74,000
students attend public schools that operate under the state policies of
Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah. The other 20 percent attend Bureau of
Indian Affairs schools, which are financed by the U.S. Department of
the Interior. Some BIA schools have entered into grant or contract
status, which offers reservation officials more autonomy and
control.

Most schools on the reservation are also a far cry from the boarding
schools of the past. It's not unusual, for example, to see Navajo
words, phrases, and sentences written on blackboards or posted on
walls.

At Mesa Elementary School in Shiprock, with a student body that is
about 98 percent Navajo, it's easy to spot the Indian influence right
away. On a large piece of paper stretched across the main hall is a
"clan" chart, in which students write down the name of the Navajo
family branch to which they belong. "Hadoonee Nili?" reads another
sign, meaning, "What is your clan?"

Glojean Todacheene, the principal and one of a small number of
Navajo administrators, prides herself on her heritage. And she's made
strides in hiring Navajo teachers, overcoming some initial skepticism
from Navajo parents who had the opposite fear of parents that were
distrustful of Anglo-run schools: Some of these other parents had only
known Anglo teachers and assumed they would teach their children
better. Currently, about half the teachers at Mesa Elementary are
Navajo.

"It wasn't until the late '60s that you saw one or two Navajo
teachers, and now you hear children saying they want to become a
teacher or a principal," she says. "If we're telling tribal people to
be self-sufficient, and one of the major employers is the school
system, it should be available to them as a job option rather than
someone coming from the rest of the 49 states."

At Mesa, it seems, the major complaint of Native American teachers
is simply that they can't find enough classroom material printed in
Navajo.

Marilyn Deal, a 4th grade Navajo teacher and Ford program graduate
there, teams up with an Anglo teacher so that she can teach the native
language to his students while he teaches science to her students. In
her mathematics class, students perform addition and subtraction and
are also responsible for writing out the numerical names in Navajo.

Deal, who is a grandmother of four, says she struggles to find
materials that are relevant--or at least identifiable--to her students,
many of whom have never left Shiprock. Too often, she says, she
encounters materials with "East Coast" terms like "skyscraper'' that
she needs to explain to the children.

Another Navajo teacher at Mesa, Nona Johnson, teaches a class for
emotionally disturbed students in the 2nd to 5th grades. She says that
brushing up on her Navajo language through the classes she took as part
of the Navajo-Ford program has helped her reach parents and
grandparents. Her students' situations require frequent meetings with
parents, or, in some cases grandparents acting as caretakers, many of
whom speak Navajo.

And the students respond better in that language as well, she has
found. Tell a misbehaving student to "cut it out,'' and it may not
register, she says. "But when you say it in Navajo, somehow it
clicks."

Still, that's not to say all Ford program graduates teach classes
that focus exclusively on the Navajo identity.

For example, Darrell Clauschee's 6th grade classroom at Chinle
Elementary School practically bursts with Japanese art and culture. A
Japanese zodiac chart, origami creations, and paper fish and kites hang
around the room.

Learning origami--the Japanese art of folding paper into
designs--helps the students listen and develop good hand-eye
coordination, explains Clauschee, a former substitute teacher. And the
Navajo culture seems to share at least one aspect with the Japanese
culture--a respect for elders, which appears to be a primary component
of Clauschee's classroom. "They understand that I'm an elder person;
they give me respect," he says, as students file into his classroom and
wait for him to finish his conversation with a visitor. "I do the same
thing right back to them."

In a report issued last year, Recruiting New Teachers, a Belmont,
Mass.-based nonprofit organization, contended that programs that help
paraprofessionals earn their teaching credentials can be an effective
way to create a diverse and culturally responsive teaching force. The
Navajo-Ford initiative was featured in the report.

David Haselkorn, the president of the organization, says that
paraprofessionals who become teachers can serve as good role models,
especially for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
"That's one of the really strong parts of good paraeducator-to-teacher
projects, like the Navajo Nation Ford Teacher Education Program," he
says. "These teachers implicitly say, 'I can do it, you can do it
too.'"

From the tribe's perspective, the Ford Foundation also brought a
much-needed credibility to its efforts to train more Navajo
teachers.

For one thing, the funding, which totaled almost $3.5 million over
six years, helped the Navajo Nation to set up an office of teacher
education, which will continue even when the Ford money runs out next
March. For another, program organizers say, the Ford program marked the
first time that the Navajo administrators were able to call the shots
in telling colleges and universities what they wanted out of a
program.

"Typically, foundations give grants to institutions," says Joseph
Aguerrebere, a program officer with the Ford Foundation. But by giving
the money directly to the Navajo Nation, he says, the power
relationship was different. "The Navajo Nation could sit at the table
with these institutions and say, 'How can we work together?'"

By having more control, the Indian leaders were able to stipulate
certain conditions for the universities for its many nontraditional
students, such as bringing courses and services to the reservation.

Annual reviews indicate that the program has been fruitful. It has
graduated 199 students through last year, with more students in the
pipeline for graduation this year and next. Moreover, the retention
rate has averaged 90 percent since 1992.

But one issue continues to plague program administrators:
standardized tests that states require of new teachers. The
Pre-Professional Skills Test, or PPST, which serves as an entrance exam
into teacher education programs, and the National Teacher Examination,
or NTE, have stymied some Navajo students.

The controversy over the usefulness of these standardized tests for
Native Americans mirrors a national debate launched on behalf of
minority teachers by those who claim that the exams are racially and
culturally biased. For those who dispute the claims of bias, it also
raises the issue of the price to be paid for putting a less qualified,
albeit more culturally attuned, teacher in the classroom.

The consortium colleges have agreed not to require the PPST of
students. That's important, says Elmer J. Guy, the deputy director of
the Navajo Nation's division of education, who insists that the PPST
does not guarantee that individuals who pass the exam will necessarily
be better teachers.

As for the widely used NTE, it continues to be a thorn in the side
for some of the prospective Navajo teachers. The Arizona institutions
in the consortium do not require the NTE. The New Mexico education
department requires the NTE for licensure, but permits students who do
not pass the exam to prepare a portfolio and present it before a state
review panel as an alternative licensure procedure. Colorado's Fort
Lewis College designed its program to meet New Mexico state
requirements.

Echoing the arguments of many minority groups who perform poorly on
standardized tests, the Navajo organizers say that the test is
culturally biased. But the Navajo administrators also say that the
test, particularly with its aural portion, discriminates against
bilingual Native American students who hear a question in English,
translate it to themselves in Navajo, and then translate the answer
back into English.

Anita Tsinnajinnie, the executive director of the Navajo education
division, argues that a bilingual teacher who passes the exam is
probably twice as capable as a monolingual teacher who passes it. For
that matter, she says that although the program is geared toward
growing their own teachers, a teacher who graduates from the program
could teach anywhere.

Roxanne Gorman, the director of the Navajo Nation's office of
teacher education programs, adds that the Navajo-Ford program students
haven't gotten any special exceptions. They have had to meet the same
requirements of any other student at the respective colleges and
universities. "We don't want it watered down; we don't want diploma
mills. The students have to meet the institutions' requirements," she
says.

Recruiting New Teacher's Haselkorn sees a straightforward solution
to the test-taking issue: If the tests are found to be inappropriate or
biased, get rid of them, he says. Otherwise, find ways to help the
students who are qualified in every other way to learn the test-taking
skills and other information that will enable them to jump through that
final hoop.

With that approach, says Haselkorn, the teachers who can add
much-needed diversity to the schools won't be barred from the system.
"They are bringing added value to the school culture and the classroom
that may not be recognized by standardized tests," he says. "That's not
to say that they should not have to meet the same qualifications that
other teachers do, but I think we tend to overlook the added value that
they bring."

The Navajo Nation has committed to proceed with a program
specifically geared toward training Navajo teachers when the Ford money
runs out. Each of the consortium institutions has also agreed to
continue its role in the process, with staff members specifically
assigned to work on Navajo teacher education projects. At the same
time, Diné College is hoping to earn accreditation for its own
four-year teacher education program.

The emphasis on Navajo culture and language will remain a key
feature of all the programs, say organizers. Each institution will
attempt to offer what organizers call "value added" characteristics,
aimed at the needs of Navajo students, such as continued on-site
instruction, part-time student status, Navajo faculty members, and
counseling.

All of these features are designed to foster special care for Navajo
teachers, whom reservation officials see as the vehicle through which
their culture will be preserved and passed on.

Elmer Guy, of the Navajo's division of education, says that
preservation of tradition is essential not only for student knowledge,
but for the vitality of his people. As he puts it, "If you don't know
your history, you are history."

Read "Passing on
Traditions, Preparing Children: Navajo Teachers Lead the Way ," a
1996 article from the Ford Foundation
Report.

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